But today, we’re upgrading it further with three of the most requested features since launch.

Keyword volume is now international

Since launch day, KW Explorer has only had support for US volume, but as of today, that’s no longer the case. Russ Jones has been working with the team to support a larger capacity for international volume data, and we’ve got significant coverage for UK, Canada, and Australia, more moderate data for other Western languages and countries, and a small amount in regions and languages beyond those. Over time, we’ll be refining and adding to the keyword volume corpus so we can continue to improve.

Note that volume data in the US is still our most accurate, as we’re able to apply our clickstream dataset (which is currently US-only) to those metrics. Outside the US, our data will be more similar to what you find in Google AdWords, though our volume buckets still have greater accuracy overall and less spikiness month to month. For temporal fluctuation data, I’d still recommend Google Trends, whose accuracy seems much better than in years past.

Suggestions filters now include questions

Many users of KW Explorer have noted a fondness for specifically finding keyword searches in the form of questions. We’ve heard from fans of AnswerThePublic (which visualizes Google Suggest data), who were hoping we could add that type of data/filtering. Today, it’s here!

The questions filter goes across all the types of suggestions data we pull, and uses a fairly comprehensive set of question formats (who, what, where, when, why – and also: is, does, can, how, etc). In testing this feature, I’ve been pretty impressed; there are a ton of great content ideas in these, even on the ones without a lot of search volume.

Keyword grouping at the click of a button

Another of our most-requested features since our private beta was a way to group similar keywords together so they could all be added to a list or quickly filtered through together. I love the way the team put this feature together: not just offering one way to do it, but providing three different groupings based on how closely vs. distantly related you want to see those terms grouped.

Lexical similarity, the spelling-and-phrase-based closeness of the words to each other, is how KW Explorer does grouping. As you can see, *low* lexical similarity provides fewer groups with more keywords in each, while *high* lexical similarity gives more groups and fewer keywords.

Grouping makes scanning easier, but we’ve also added a slick, “one click to add all keywords in a group” button to the feature.

For those of you who like keywords in groups, this will make the process of identifying and adding them to lists (either en masse or individually) vastly more streamlined.

In addition to those features, we’ve also made two other substantive changes to Keyword Explorer:

Improved Keyword Difficulty scores

The model used for Keyword Difficulty in KW Explorer was a significant upgrade from the old Keyword Difficulty tool. We addressed a lot of the bunching and overly simplistic handling, and produced what I felt was a vastly superior set of numbers. However, not all scores felt right, and in doing some research with the team, Dr. Pete discovered a great deal of bunching at the bottom of the score set, wherein far too many terms were getting a 0–10 score than should. He made a fix that we’ve now pushed to production and you should see better KW Difficulty scores across the board.

It’s a small change, but one that improves the model, and we’ll continue to watch for outliers and issues so we can keep improving. Dr. Pete keeps collecting feedback for analysis, so if you find terms and phrases that don’t seem to match, drop him a line over Twitter or get in touch with us through any of our support channels. Difficulty isn’t designed to be an absolute, though. When using it, we strongly recommend looking at similar keywords in a sector based on their relative differences in KW Difficulty, not as a perfect number in the abstract (similar to DA/PA).

More lists for everyone

Lists are one of the most useful parts of Keyword Explorer. They’ve saved me hours upon hours of tedious Excel imports, cutting, pasting, fetching metrics, etc. But we noticed that many folks were filling up their lists fast, so we’ve tripled the limits for both tiers of Keyword Explorer on its own, and bundled as part of Moz Pro.

If you had 10 lists, you now have 30. If you had 30 lists, you’ve now got 100.

So go to town! I’ve loved creating lists for friends, my own projects, folks I’m helping with SEO, and observing what data and insights shake out.

It’s pretty satisfying to see how fast KW Explorer gets data, how clean the exports are, and how obvious the right keywords to target become once you’ve got all the right metrics to compare.

One of my big frustrations over the years has been when we (or other software companies) release a product, and then let it languish. Great products get better through iteration, feedback, and upgrades. I’m hopeful that this is just the first of many updates I’ll have to share about Keyword Explorer’s progress, and to make that a reality, I need your help.

Please, if you haven’t yet given KW Explorer a spin, now’s a great time to do so. You can feel free to send me feedback directly – rand at moz dot com – or via our customer support, Q+A forum, Twitter, or the comments on this post.

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